Reply to: RE)6.176 Sum: C gemination (syntactic)
Afterthought on Gemination --sorry to come in late on the discussion.
The summary notes the Celtic "mutation" called "gemination" in works such
Thurneysen's Grammar of Old Irish. One should not be too quick to call it
that. Subsequent work has shown that mostly this meant the absence of
lenition or nasalization, not an actual twinning (.i. doubling) of the sound.
This is the vestige of (Common Celtic or pre-Irish) -C [-nasal] # #C--
boundaries, as opposed to those which caused lenition (-V # #C--) and
nasalization (-C[+ nasal] # #C--). Nasalization was (is) realized as the
voicing of unvoiced initial stops, and the nasalization of voiced stops, with
variations too ornate to go into here.
Note that in Old Irish, various kinds of subordination were marked very
often by the lenition or nasalization of the initial consonant of the initial
word of the clause (usu. a verb, of course). See Thurneysen for an
exhaustive display of the facts.
I cannot speak for mod. Breton, but my impression is that the Brythonic
situation largely reflects a similar "system".

re: Dick, Dick Armey
Has anyone done any 007 sleuthing on the time gap between the error and
correction? Has Armey made such errors before? What about the prosody?
Is there a tune called "Begin the Harangue" with a hard g?
Bill King Univ. of Arizona
Disclaimer: I know how to pronounce Barney Frank.